SAF

SAF is an electromagnetic scattering, radiation, and coupling computational program used to calculate the radar scattering from complex targets.

SAF is an electromagnetic scattering, radiation, and coupling computational program based on the method of moments solution of the hybrid volume-surface integral equation. In addition to traditional LU decomposition, SAF has a multilevel fast multipole method acceleration option making it very efficient in computation memory and speed.

Applications

SAF is used to calculate the radar scattering from three-dimensional complex targets that have any combination of the following:

Features

The multipole method of discretization of the volume-surface integral equation can be set to correspond to either the electric field integral equation (EFIE), magnetic field integral equation (MFIE), or the combined field integral equation (CFIE).

For a triangular mesh, Rao-Wilton-Glisson basis functions are used, and for quad-patch meshes the generalized roof-top basis functions are used. Any combination of the following mesh types are supported:

Flat triangular patches

Flat quad patches

Curvilinear quad patches

Flat-faced tetrahedron cells

Flat-faced hexahedron cells

Curvilinear hexahedron cells

Flat-faced prism

Wire segments

After solving the matrix equation, SAF can output many system parameters such as:

Radar cross section

In-Situ antenna pattern

Antenna S-parameters and impedance

Power coupling between arrays

Near-field and far-field magnitude and phase

Surface currents

Benefits

SAF can provide a fast and flexible accurate solution to many computational electromagnetic problems. SAF has been parallelized with OpenMP, Messaging Passing Interface (MPI), and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) for high performance computing with multiple cores, processors, and GPUs.

For the novice user default settings for standard or high accuracy are provided, but the advanced user has full control over the formulation. SAF has utilities like mesh27 (CAD tool for building simple targets), sample antenna pattern-generation tools (circular waveguides, rectangular waveguides, dipoles), and much more. This solver links up with Xpatch® to allow for hybrid domain decomposition solutions and shares many of the same input and output file formats.